This collection, Robots Have No Tails, was written by the married team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, and this particular edition seems to be inscribed in blue ball point pen in a hand that looks like an elder struggling with arthritis, and signed "C.L. Moore Kuttner", so...maybe it's real. I'm not sure where I got it, but I was thinking it was either a book fair in San Luis that I went to with my dad (they sold by the stacked inch) or it was procured from the $1 shelf from Cal Poly's library.
I'm pretty sure it was the library, a shelf that had a "Sale $1" sign, but there aren't any of the markings that usually show that it was a tosser. At Cal Poly they'd put old books worthy of the trash heap out for sale for a buck, and I'd regularly peruse them and made plenty of purchases. Some were cool, about rocket telemetry, and some were nerdy, about radiation and chromosomal aberrations.
I really don't have too much science fiction in my collection, and we might have the last of it here. This book has at the heart a drunken doctor who makes a robot while he's obliterated, and can't remember why or how it works like it does. The robot has nice human frailties, like vanity and anger and pessimism, if I remember correctly. It also seems like there was one particular story that garnered attention, then a second was written to sort of be an earlier story from the canon, or prequel, but it kinda had a hard time fitting together.
The title was enough for me, and I think I found a part of the attitude it took helpful for a story I was working on a little harder back then, ten years ago.
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